Every day, Françoise Prince wakes up to the sound of an airplane flying over her Ahuntsic home. “It’s probably the same one every day,” she said, since it flies overhead at almost exactly the same time — around 6:12 a.m.

Prince was one of several residents who attended a press conference Wednesday at which anti-airplane noise activist group Les Pollués de Montréal-Trudeau unveiled data they’ve collected from 10 noise measurement stations over the last year. (Prince’s brother, Raymond Prince, is the group’s senior director.)

The group installed small microphones (with the permission of homeowners) in Ahuntsic, Villeray, Saint-Michel, St-Laurent and Mont-Royal. The stations are all at least six kilometres from the airport, but the group said the data collected indicated that residents may still be negatively impacted by the noise.

The noise could be more than an annoyance — Les Pollués said it distracted students in the area and could be damaging residents’ health.

The World Health Organization has studied the impact of environmental noise on human health. “Long-term average exposure to levels above 55 dB, similar to the noise from a busy street, can trigger elevated blood pressure and heart attacks,” the WHO’s Regional Office for Europe stated in a press release in 2009.

Quebec’s Transport Ministry has set a benchmark at 65 decibels — according to the ministry, if noise levels exceed this number over 24 hours, a sound barrier should be built.

Les Pollués has presented a list of demands, including the creation of two positions for community members on the board of directors of Montreal’s airport authority, the establishment of a curfew for all planes between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., and a new review of landing and takeoff protocols.

“All of the people on the board right now are Montreal citizens,” said Christiane Beaulieu, the vice-president of communications for the Aéroports de Montréal. Four elected officials sit on the authority’s sound abatement committee. Beaulieu said the airport was not considering a curfew and the flight paths could not be changed because the positions of the runways cannot be changed.

The group said they put in the stations themselves because Montreal’s airport authority refused to install more of their own monitoring stations.

The airport has eight monitoring stations, including a mobile station.

Beaulieu said that the airport’s mobile monitoring station has been deployed to some of the areas Les Pollués monitored. “We’ve deployed our mobile stations in Ahuntsic, in Ville Mont-Royal, and once the (air) traffic starts again over Villeray, we will deploy it there as well.”

The airport’s mobile station found similar noise levels to Les Pollués’s data during its deployments in Ahuntsic and Mont-Royal, but Beaulieu said she wasn’t sure the data or the equipment could be trusted.

“We don’t know how (Les Pollués) came up with those figures,” Beaulieu said. “For us, I know it’s done professionally, it’s done in a way that’s been approved by Transport Canada. I’m sure of the data we distribute.”

The data Les Pollués collected is publicly available through the Worldwide Aircraft Noise Services website, a German-based company which collects noise monitoring data from hundreds of stations around Europe. The 10 stations installed by Les Pollués are the network’s first in Montreal.

A normal conversation typically registers at about 60 decibels. Seventy decibels is approximately equivalent to the noise of a vacuum cleaner — which is about the amount of noise that Les Pollués have measured as an airplane passes by.

“I live in Côte-des-Neiges — I hear them. But it’s not to a level that could be detrimental to your health or to your sleep,” Beaulieu said.

Les Pollués said the situation has deteriorated since 2012, when arriving and departing flight paths were changed by NAV Canada, which runs Canada’s civil aviation systems, including air traffic control. NAV Canada spokesperson Ron Singer said that the modifications to the flight plans would not have had any impact on the areas monitored by Les Pollués.

“Any particular change may be due to traffic and because of the shift in the runways due to construction. As far as NAV Canada’s changes in 2012, absolutely no effect on those areas,” Singer said.

The airport authority and Les Pollués last met in June. “They keep asking the same questions. We give them the same answers,” Beaulieu said.

The group plans to install at least six more monitoring stations in the next year, but some residents may not be around to see them.

“I put too much money in my house now to move, but I will be moving,” said Ahuntsic resident Jean-Luc Dubois. “Because of the noise.”

How loud is that noise?

The U.S.-based National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders has compiled a list of various noise levels. Here are some selected examples. All numbers are in decibels:

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